A controller for reaching and unveiling a partially occluded object of interest with an eye-in-hand robot
This work addresses a specific challenge in robotics for tasks like agricultural harvesting where objects are occluded, though it appears incremental in control scheme design.
The paper tackled the problem of controlling an eye-in-hand robot to approach and unveil a partially occluded object, such as a grape stem, using only classified point cloud data from an in-hand camera, and demonstrated through simulations and experiments with a UR5e robot that the controller can progressively unveil the object's neighborhood.
In this work, a control scheme for approaching and unveiling a partially occluded object of interest is proposed.The control scheme is based only on the classified point cloud obtained by the in-hand camera attached to the robot's end effector. It is shown that the proposed controller reaches in the vicinity of the object progressively unveiling the neighborhood of each visible point of the object of interest. It can therefore potentially achieve the complete unveiling of the object. The proposed control scheme is evaluated through simulations and experiments with a UR5e robot with an in-hand RealSense camera on a mock-up vine setup for unveiling the stem of a grape.